A World Party in our future?

Introduction

Nearly a decade has passed since I wrote the World Party
essay for Ecosocialist Review, a now defunct journal. A vigorous transnational
movement to challenge the hegemony of global capital has now emerged, with its
clarion call first being heard in Seattle, last in Genoa, soon in the capital
of the world’s hyperpower. Transnational politics, loosely described as red and
green*, advanced with numerous confabs, with the Global Green meeting in
Australia and the World Social Forum, Porto Allegre held this year standing
out. The transnationalization of labor is now unfolding, although still far
short of the level required to be an effective constraint on global capital.
War criminals like Henry Kissinger now fear harassment while traveling abroad
and even eventual prosecution if the International Criminal Court is fully
empowered. However, NATO under U.S. hyperpower hegemony has perverted the
legitimate concept that universal human rights have priority over national sovereignty
in its criminal aggression against Yugoslavia and its illegal Hague
prosecutions of war crimes in the Balkans (refusing of course to indict NATO
itself for its war crimes), while allowing real genocide to occur in Rwanda,
and in Iraq (the death of 500,000 children from the sanctions regime). The
enforcement of international law is mere lip service to the U.S. State
Department that has retreated from its application to its client, the Israeli
terrorist state.

I remain more convinced than ever that with the eventual
emergence of a red/green World Party, a necessary condition for ending the rule
of global capital will be achieved. There is now a huge literature on
globalization and the challenges of transnationalizing a red and green
movement.

ATTAC: http://attac.org/, campaign for a Tobin tax (This campaign is
vigorously pursued in Europe, especially France. At the G-77 meeting in Havana
in April 2000, Fidel Castro proposed a 1% Tobin tax, i.e., a tax on
international financial transactions flowing electronically every nanosecond.
In a few days a 1% tax would generate enough revenue to save the lives of the
12 million children who are estimated to die annually from preventable causes
in this world run by transnational capital. Castro also pointed out that the
preventable global mortality of three years is equal to the death toll of WWII.
This is the largely invisible genocide carried out by global capitalism. A red
and green movement should be informed by both the great achievements and
monstrous crimes of past and present socialist societies, but Stalin, Mao and
Pol Pot might look with envy at this genocide in a world dominated by global
capital.)

Working USA (http://www.workingusa.org) has had several
enlightening articles on the themes of labor and globalization, the challenge
of transnationalizing labor solidarity. In particular, check the following
issues:

Summer 2001 (Labor Rights in the Global Economy)

Spring 2001: National Security or International Solidarity, David Bacon

May/June 1999: Alliances Across the Border: U.S. Labor in
the Era of Globalization, Bruce Nissen

·James O’Connor has a succinct description of red and
green: Those who wish to abolish the wage form of labor and the commodity form
of need satisfaction, to be done with global capital... deserve a color (red)
as do those who seek to abolish the state as well (anarchist black). Those who
want to revolutionize the capitalist productive forces, to harmonize them with
principles of ecological rationality and sensibility, need their color green.
And those who wish to do both at the same time, to revolutionize the capitalist
production relations andproductive forces, and to democratize
material existence in every way possible, want their colors red green or green
red. Capitalism Nature Socialism June 2001, House Organ, p. 2. In the same
essay, O’Connor writes: Yet at a certain point in the struggle against global
capital (when I don’t know) we’ll need our own party...In the last analysis, a
movement without a party is a force without political direction.

Some thoughts on the future of the socialist left

I submit that rebirth of a socialist left, necessarily red
and green,must include putting
universal human rights, and therefore resistance to neoliberal globalization at
the center of its vision. The challenge for each local organization is to
creatively interrelate the global, national and local dimensions of class
struggle in organizing locally, always putting forward a vision of
globalization from below.

Socialism is the impure and contradictory potentialtransition between capitalism and communism. A new vision of
communism - a global civilization maximizing human developmentand its sustainable relation to nature-
should inspire allsocialists, in spite
of the well-known limitations of all past and present socialist
societies.We need to be both more
realistic and utopian, in illuminating a path from a society serving capital to
one serving human needs. Apart from the purist cults, socialists are active
organizers for reforms under capitalism that enlarge the sphere of satisfaction
of human needs and democratic participation in all areas of social life and the
economy. This project requires a transnational movement,
strategically-conceived, to unify all those who stand to gain from these
reforms, namely the great majority (particularly the oppressed and
exploited). The ecological question must be answered with a program to
restore both our humanly -constructed environment and the biosphere itself,
fully utilizing renewable energy and new information technologies for a
sustainable economy. A radical vision of planetary
solar communismcan attract new
generations to its realization(from each according to her ability, to each
according to her needs, with
each/her referring to both human beings and ecosystems). We demand the impossible!(impossible only within the limits of serving capital first)

WORLD PARTY MEMBERSHIP CARD

Children of the Planet First!

Signature:

Date:

Initiation fee: $0.01 or lowest denomination in any
currency; all members are obligated to recruit at least one other (use initiation
fees for recruitment).

Founding Convention in Cyberspace to be held when
membership reaches 50,000,000

Every child born on Earth has the right to a full life of
creative fulfillment, to an environment free of hatred and pollution, and to a
world with our planet’s full complement of biodiversity intact. The enormous
potential of new information and renewable energy technologies to achieve these
goals can only be realized by a radical democratization and demilitarization of
global society.We demand the
impossible! (impossible only within the limits of serving capital first).

Global unionism is the answer to global capitalism. There
is no other way J. Henning, Executive Secretary-Treasurer, California Labor
Federation

The international ideal unites the human raceBilly Bragg,The
Internationale

The World Party does not form a separate party opposed to
other progressive parties. It has no interests separate and apart from those of
humanity as a whole.It does not set up
sectarian principles of its own, by which to shape and mould the movement for a
sustainable global economy in a healthy planetary environment.

The World Party is distinguished from the other
progressive parties by this only:

1)In the national
struggles of progressives in different countries, it points out and brings to
the front the common interests of all of humanity, independently of all
nationality.

2)In the various
stages of development which the struggle for global sustainability has to pass
through, it always and everywhere represents the interests of the movementas a whole.

(after The Communist Manifesto, with apologies to K. Marx
and W. Warren Wagar)

This initiative grew out of reading W. Warren Wagar’s
novel A Short History of the Future (first published in 1989, 3rd
edition 1999, University of Chicago Press); see A World Party, Vehicle of
Global Green Left, EcoSocialist Review, Spring 1992. While it is a far less
than half-hearted attempt to actualize a real World Party, a transnational
grassroots political force as unprecedented as the ongoing globalization of
capital, I am trying to provoke the reader to investigate further. There is now
an embryonic world party, the Transnational Radical Party, a project of the
Italian Radical Party (http://www.radicalparty.org/home.htm). Its
focus has been on gaining a moratorium on the death penalty worldwide, an
international tribunal to try war crimes in former/present Yugoslavia (now at
the Hague, the court that refuses to indict Clinton, Blair, NATO for its war
crimes) and legalization of drugs. Up to now it has not addressed the challenge
of constraining the global power of the transnational corporations and
banks.

There is a World Party website (There is no World Party
yet. It is just an idea.): http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/archive/praxis/wp/index.htm,
includes archived discussion, extensive bibliography). The formation of several
more transnational parties can be expected in this century, including at least
one sponsored by the transnationals themselves.